"And His Meatiness will welcome those of all endianness, for their love of the taste of Freedom shall unite them at the great Open Source Cookout"

-- The Book of Sauerkraut, Chapter 12, Verse 730

The Beefy Miracle hath arrived. Behold, for it is available to download now!

Fedora 17 for Power has closely followed the Fedora development and release cycle, so please see the Fedora 17 Release Announcement for general information on Fedora 17.

Fedora 17 for Power has been cooked and taste-tested using IBM POWER hardware, which will provide the best culinary experience. It has received very little testing on other platforms. As always, we welcome targeted patches from the Fedora for Power community to address bugs on other PowerPC platforms.

Contents

Getting Fedora 17 for Power

Fedora 17 for Power is available from any Secondary mirror. This release is focused on ppc64 systems, however the 32-bit ppc tree and install images continue to be built and made available. Note that Fedora uses SHA256 instead of MD5 or SHA-1 to verify images in a more secure way. For more information, refer to #Verify_Fedora on this page.

Power-specific Features

Fedora 17 contains support in yum and rpm for the ppc64p7 subarchitecture, for packages built with Power7-specific optimizations. Yum and RPM will prefer ppc64p7 packages on Power7 systems. While no ppc64p7 packages are part of Fedora 17 itself, a test repository has been made available at http://dwa.fedorapeople.org/ppc64p7-test/. You may configure it during installation or place this repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ post-install

Note that these packages are scratch builds and are not signed.

Power7-optimized RPMs may be built by using 'rpmbuild --target=ppc64p7'

Fedora 17 for Power now uses the grub2 bootloader to boot the installed system. yaboot is still used on the installation media but should be considered otherwise deprecated.

Fedora 17 for Power beta is also capable of upgrading a Fedora 16 for Power system, including the switch from yaboot to grub2 as the bootloader. This has only been extensively tested on IBM POWER systems.

IBM hardware no longer needs to pass the 'serial' parameter during install

Known Issues

One sample of the YDL PowerStation (aka 'Bimini') does not work with grub2-2.0-0.36.beta6.fc17, due to a crash in grub2-probe. (Bug #831825)

This has been fixed in grub2-2.0-0.37.beta6.fc17, which is available from the updates repo. If you install it from rescue mode, be sure to run 'grub2-install /dev/sda1' after installing the RPM. Replace '/dev/sda1' with your PReP partition.

On some MacPPC systems, the pata_macio kernel module isn't automatically loaded if ata is on macio. The symptom is inability to see internal disks on install and dropping into initramfs shell on boot. Run modprobe pata_macio to load the module. (Bug #831361)

Please file bug reports on this release if you find any problems not identified above.

Verify Fedora

Fedora does not publish MD5 or SHA1 hashes to verify images since they are not secure enough. Instead we have been using SHA256 since Fedora 11. In Linux, you can use sha256sum command (part of coreutils and installed by default) to verify the Fedora image

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!